sweet juniper!

Last fall, all the streets were closed around Wood's building in downtown Detroit because Michael Bay was in town filming Transformers. I heard John Turturro was in the movie, so I went to watch because I figured it would be the best opportunity I'd ever get to yell, "Nobody fucks with the Jesus!" over and over at him while he tries to drink a macchiato or talk on his cell phone in between takes. Overall, what I could see of the shoot was pretty disappointing. There were a bunch of hipsters who looked like they moved to Hollywood ten years ago to make the next Pulp Fiction but somehow found themselves hauling cables around for Michael Bay instead. There was an astonishing amount of equipment and lighting. But all I saw them filming was take after take of a bunch of extras running down the street pretending to be scared of something they were pretending to see. Pretty underwhelming. But last night I saw the commercial for the movie, and those same people were now totally running from Megatron and the Decepticons with all kinds of badass explosions in the buildings around them.

One of the last cases I worked on before I quit being a lawyer was a patent infringement lawsuit against every major movie studio and distributor for some boring digital technology method that the plaintiff claimed to have invented. I was on the side of the studios, and spent several months sifting through hundreds of thousands of documents related to the process of making pretty much every crappy movie from the last five years. Seriously, you would not believe how many people and man hours went into Kangaroo Jack. I saw it on an airplane, and I wanted to believe it could all be blamed on Jerry O'Connell and his portly black sidekick and the few Australian rubes they conned into acting in a movie about a rapping kangaroo. Sadly, there were literally thousands of people responsible for it. Many of them, I'm sure, knew just how bad it was, and considered it "just their job" to spend hundreds of hours syncing the lips of a CGI kangaroo to the Outback Steakhouse version of Rapper's Delight. I can sympathize. I certainly considered it "just a job" to spend hundreds of hours looking at documents showing just how boring it is to actually make movies.

I haven't had many interesting thoughts lately. Nothing exciting has happened to us, nothing even as exciting as watching a bunch of people running down the street from robotic aliens no one can see. I wish I had an army of talented people to add some CGI to our lives or at least give me some better lighting, but the reality is other than building Juniper a dollhouse, all I have been doing lately is sitting on the couch watching bad movies on cable every night in the dark. The other day it was one of those Matrix sequels. Last night it was Spiderman 2. One time Wood woke up and said, "Go write a blog post. Stop watching these crappy movies."

"I don't have anything to say. . .Besides, do you realize how many thousands of people worked very hard to make these crappy movies? It's the least I can do to to watch."

[I'll post pictures of the dollhouse tomorrow]